This collection of international research and collaborative theoretical innovation examines the socio-cultural contexts and negotiations that young people face when growing up in rural settings across the world. This book is strikingly different to a standard edited book of loosely linked, but basically independent, chapters. In this case, the book presents both thematically organised case studies and co-authored commentaries that integrate and advance current understandings and debates about rural childhood and youth.

Despite society's current preoccupation with interrelated issues such as obesity, increasingly sedentary lifestyles and children's health, there has until now been little published research that directly addresses the place and meaning of physical activity in young people's lives. In this important new collection, leading international scholars address that deficit by exploring the differences in young people's experiences and meanings of physical activity as these are related to their social, cultural and geographical locations, to their abilities and their social and personal biographies.

The book places young people's everyday lives at the centre of the study, arguing that it this 'everydayness' (school, work, friendships, ethnicity, family routines, interests, finances, location) that is key to shaping the engagement of young people in physical activity. By allowing the voices of young people to be heard through these pages, the book helps the reader to make sense of how young people see physical activity in their lives.

Drawing on a breadth of theoretical frameworks, and challenging the orthodox assumptions that underpin contemporary physical activity policy, interventions and curricula, this book powerfully refutes the argument that young people are 'the problem' and instead demonstrates the complex social constructions of physical activity in the lives of young people. Young People, Physical Activity and the Everyday is essential reading for both students and researchers with a particular interest physical activity, physical education, health, youth work and social policy.

Cyber-bullying, sexting, and the effects that violent video games have on children are widely discussed and debated. With a renowned international group of researchers and scholars, the Second Edition of the Handbook of Children and the Media covers these topics, is updated with cutting-edge research, and includes comprehensive analysis of the field for students and scholars. This revision examines the social and cognitive effects of new media, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, iPads, and cell phones, and how children are using this new technology. This book summarizes the latest research on children and the media and suggests directions for future research. This book also attempts to provide students with a deliberate examination of how children use, enjoy, learn from, and are advantaged or disadvantaged by regular exposure to television, new technologies, and other electronic media.

Children from around the world show us God in ways that we may have forgotten

"When I looked out my window at the changing seasons, I didn't really see anything at all. My eyes were focused on my work and all the tasks I had to do each day.... Then one morning...racing to get to work, I caught a glimpse of the fiery red leaves of a Japanese maple tree in late autumn. For a moment I stopped in my tracks. It was a wake-up call. 'There is a world out there, ' I thought, 'and a world beyond that world. And you, ' I said to myself, 'are missing both. If this is what it means to be an adult, you need to find a way to see the world more like a child.'"from the introduction

What does God do? How do we let God in? If you met God, what would you say?

Here are the "theological" answers of young spiritual thinkers from around the world, representing more than twenty different religious traditions. In sharing how they see God, they'll help you to see God in new ways.

In a poetic language of images all their own, these children re-awaken us to the mysteries and wonders of the universe, and lead us to our own understanding of the spiritual.

Norman Denzin presents a social psychological account of how the lives of children are shaped by social interaction, particularly interaction with parents and other caretakers. He examines the special language of children, their socialization experiences, and the emergence of their selfconceptions- all as they occur in natural surroundings: daycare centers, homes, playgrounds, schools, and many other places. Denzin is concerned not with sequential developmental changes during childhood, but with how children themselves enter into the processes that lead to self-awareness, socialized abilities and attribute-such as pride, perceptiveness, dignity, and poise.

Through his symbolic interactionist approach, Denzin shows how language-the key link between children and others-is required in everyday interpersonal relationships and how the sense of self develops as linguistic skills grow. He stresses the importance of play and games as processes by which children teach themselves about social behavior; he also shows that, for children, play takes on the seriousness of adults' work.

Denzin maintains that the definitions of childhood by the 1970s had become detrimentally entrenched in educational and political policies regarding children. He recommends a new definition that recognizes children as individuals seeking meaning for their own actions. This book will be valuable to all social scientists concerned with symbolic and linguistic foundations of the socialization process. A new introduction reviews developments since publication of the original edition. This book raises the interactions between adults and children to a new level.

This practical resource is designed to help professionals, parents and carers as they support children with vision impairments to develop independence in everyday tasks. Using the Early Years Foundation Stage framework as a basis, it provides a wealth of strategies and activities to develop key skills, including dressing, maintaining personal hygiene, eating and drinking and road safety. This is an invaluable tool that can be dipped in and out of to help make learning fun, boosting the child's confi dence and helping create a positive 'can- do' attitude when faced with new challenges. This book: Addresses the main problem areas for babies and young visually impaired children and their families, by providing simple explanations of skills and offering strategies and techniques to support progression onto the next stage. Is written in a fully accessible style, with photocopiable pages and additional downloadable resources. Provides a variety of documentation to chart the child's development and show progress over time. Research shows strong indicators that early intervention can reduce or eliminate developmental delays in children with a vision impairment. The supporting strategies in this book help busy professionals and carers to make every opportunity a learning opportunity, allowing children with a vision impairment to become confi dent and independent individuals.

Key Issues in Childhood and Youth Studies presents an informed and critical commentary on a range of key issues related to children and childhood, from birth to eighteen years. Challenging current orthodoxies within the adult world on the nature of childhood, it is an essential text for students of childhood and youth studies as well as those studying relevant professional qualifications in social work, teaching and health.

Exploring ideas from the historical development of childhood to the demonising of youth, it is divided into five clearly defined sections, each with their own editorial introduction which highlights the key themes. The sections focus on:

• the concept and creation of childhood
• child development
• ideas of risk, protection and childhood
• the politics of childhood
• international perspectives on childhood.

This invaluable textbook provides an overview of childhood and youth studies and encourages students to think about the issues discussed and to develop their own ideas. Each chapter contains student activities, key concept boxes, recommended further reading and a reflection exercise.

Key Issues in Childhood and Youth Studies presents an informed and critical commentary on a range of key issues related to children and childhood, from birth to eighteen years. Challenging current orthodoxies within the adult world on the nature of childhood, it is an essential text for students of childhood and youth studies as well as those studying relevant professional qualifications in social work, teaching and health.

Exploring ideas from the historical development of childhood to the demonising of youth, it is divided into five clearly defined sections, each with their own editorial introduction which highlights the key themes. The sections focus on:

• the concept and creation of childhood
• child development
• ideas of risk, protection and childhood
• the politics of childhood
• international perspectives on childhood.

This invaluable textbook provides an overview of childhood and youth studies and encourages students to think about the issues discussed and to develop their own ideas. Each chapter contains student activities, key concept boxes, recommended further reading and a reflection exercise.

In this groundbreaking study, Linda Cusworth explores the impact of parental employment or unemployment on the educational and emotional well-being of their children. Using theoretical apparatus from Bourdieu and data from the youth survey of the British Household Panel Study, the research in this book analyzes the impact of parental employment on those born between 1978 and 1990. This study is unique in going beyond the educational achievement and later patterns of employment of the young people studied to look at the whole of children's lives, including their attitudes and aspirations, relationships and emotional well-being. The changed norms of maternal employment and the substantial increase in lone parenthood over the last few decades make this an especially important study both for academics in social and public policy and sociology, and for policy makers.

Children, Consumerism, and the Common Good explores the impact of consumer culture on the lives of children in the United States and globally, focusing on two phenomena: advertising to children and child labor. Christian communities have a critical role to play in securing the well-being of children and challenging the cultural trends that undermine that well-being. Themes in the tradition of Catholic social teaching can move us beyond the tensions between children's rights activists and those who propose a return to "family values" and can inform practices of resistance, participation, and transformation. Roche argues that children are full, interdependent members of the communities of which they are a part. They have a claim on the fruits of our common life and are called to participate in that life according to their age and ability. The principle of the common good forms the benchmark for analyzing children's participation in the market and the ways in which market logic shapes other institutions of civil society, particularly educational institutions. The Cristo Rey Network of schools is highlighted as an example of institutional transformation which shapes children's participation in education and the economic life of their families and communities in a spirit of solidarity.

When players play, there is a transactional process at work, whether for children on a teeter-totter or pandas playing with peers. In this edited volume, nine experts on play show how play transactions are an important dynamic of play across cultures, age groups, even species. A rich array of play contexts is evident across the nine chapters, encompassing varied continents, age groups, and sorts of players. The play processes of giant pandas, of home-visiting therapists, of Polynesian women, and of autistic kids are included here. The healthy interchange of ideas about play, one of the hallmarks of the Association for the Study of Play, is a process that is cultivated in this new volume.

This book invites readers to both reassess and reconceptualize definitions of childhood and pedagogy by imagining the possibilities - past, present, and future - provided by the aesthetic turn to science fiction. It explores constructions of children, childhood, and pedagogy through the multiple lenses of science fiction as a method of inquiry, and discusses what counts as science fiction and why science fiction counts. The book examines the notion of relationships in a variety of genres and stories; probes affect in the convergence of childhood and science fiction; and focuses on questions of pedagogy and the ways that science fiction can reflect the status quo of schooling theory, practice, and policy as well as offer alternative educative possibilities. Additionally, the volume explores connections between children and childhood studies, pedagogy and posthumanism. The various contributors use science fiction as the frame of reference through which conceptual links between inquiry and narrative, grounded in theories of media studies, can be developed.

This book investigates child domestic servitude in Ghana, showing the process of the children's recruitment into domestic servitude, revealing their working conditions, and detailing the methods of compensation. It seeks to answer the question of whether child domestic servants are contemporary slaves. The findings show that elite households in Ghana exploit children from rural regions. This is because they have taken advantage of a historical practice that allowed children to live with older members of their extended families and provide domestic services. In return, they are to be given the chance to receive formal education or to learn a trade. The author's research techniques helped overcome the usual methodical difficulties that exclude child domestic servants from mainstream research on child labor exploitation. The author's approach allowed observation of the servants, not as isolated individuals, but as members of groups whose activities influenced their status and life chances. Most of the participants in this research provided vivid and chilling accounts of domestic servitude in Ghana. The book provides a glimpse of the contemporary slavery that is present in Ghana today.

This astute book initiates a broad discussion from a variety of different disciplines about how we place children nationally, globally and within development discourses. Unlike other books of its kind, it does not seek to dwell solely on the abiding complexities of local comparisons. Rather, it elaborates larger concerns about the changing nature of childhood, young people's experiences, their citizenship and the embodiment of their political identities as they are embedded in the processes of national development and globalization. In particular, this book concentrates on three main issues: nation building and developing children, child participation and activism in the context of development, and globalization and children's live in the context of what has been called "the end of development." These are relatively broad research perspectives that find focus in what the authors term "reproducing and developing children" as a key issue of national and global concern. They further argue that understanding children and reproduction is key to understanding globalization.

The Association for the Study of Play (TASP) is the sponsor of this eighth volume in the Play & Culture Studies series. TASP is a professional group of researchers who study play. The focus of this eighth volume of the Play & Culture Studies series is on how play takes many forms as it cuts across species, ages, and cultures. The articles in this volume present current theoretical and empirical research on play and culture from a variety of disciplines including psychology, education, animal studies, and sociology. Applications to practice and policy implications are presented as well. Volume 8 continues the tradition of the Play & Culture series by presenting a view of play that is broad in scope both in terms of the subjects of study and the ways in which researchers approach the study of these diverse forms of play.

Child poverty is rising across affluent Western societies; how it is measured is vital to how governments act to prevent, alleviate or eliminate it. While the roots of childhood poverty are fiercely debated and contested, they are all too often misrepresented in policy and media discourses. Seeking to redress this problem, Treanor places children's experiences, needs and concerns at the centre of this critical examination of the contemporary policies and political discourses surrounding poverty in childhood. She examines a broad range of structural, institutional and ideological factors common across developed nations, and their impacts, to interrogate how poverty in childhood is conceptualised and operationalised in policy and to forge a radical pathway for an alternative future.

The editors of this volume are committed to the philosophy of treating emotionally disturbed children in the life milieu. Both have been intensely involved in training "online" therapists--child care workers. They are convinced that there is no one "right way" in milieu treatment, and propose a electric model for treatment.

Like many of the other writers included in this book, Whittaker and Trieschman conceive of treatment as a total life experience. Th ey do not see the individual versus the group, but the individual within the group situation. They also do not see permissiveness versus limitations, professional staff versus nonprofessional staff, or the institution versus an outside of the community.

The book is divided into two sections: the fi rst is a dialogue between the editors on current issues in residential treatment and problems in treating children. The second is a collection of readings. This is one of the first sourcebooks covering the therapeutic milieu for children in residential treatment centers, specifi cally emotionally disturbed children. It is also an excellent text for courses on the emotionally disturbed child, milieu treatment, and child welfare.

"James K. Whittaker" is The Charles O. Cressey Endowed Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington School of Social Work, Seattle where he has served as a member of senior faculty since 1970. His research and teaching interests encompass child and family policy and services including residential treatment, and the integration of evidence-based practices into contemporary child & family services. He is also series editor of Modern Applications of Social Work for Transaction Publishers.

"Albert E. Trieschman" was a Staff Clinical Psychologist at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston. From 1960 until his death in 1984, he was founding Executive Director of the Walker Home & School in Needham, Massachusetts.

The United States is currently grappling with how to prepare our students to be computer literate citizens in the competitive technological world we live in. Understanding how children develop computer knowledge, and the ways that adults are able to guide their computer learning experiences, is a vital task facing parents and educators. This groundbreaking book is an attempt to fill a gap in current understanding of how we become computer literate and proposes a theory of how computer literacy skills emerge in computer users.

That children need nature for health and well-being is widely accepted, but what type of nature? Specifically, what type of nature is not only necessary but realistically available in the complex and rapidly changing worlds that children currently live in? This book examines child-nature definitions through two related concepts: the need for connecting to nature and the processes by which opportunities for such contact can be enhanced. It analyses the available nature from a scientific perspective of habitats, species and environments, together with the role of planning, to identify how children in cities can and do connect with nature. This book challenges the notion of a universal child and childhood by recognizing children's diverse life worlds and experiences which guide them into different and complex ways of interacting with the natural world. Unfortunately not all children have the freedom to access the nature that is present in the cities where they live. This book addresses the challenge of designing biodiverse cities in which nature is readily accessible to children.

This book offers a rich and detailed empirical account of children's play and interaction in the school playground. Drawing on the approaches of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, 'Talk and Social Interaction in the Playground' examines the organisation of membership and social action in a game created by a group of children. It offers rich insights into the methods and practices used by children to produce play and social order, making a significant and substantial contribution to the study of talk-in-interaction, as well as to studies of children's play, competencies, and social interaction. The book demonstrates the importance of putting aside preconceived assumptions about how children talk and interact in order to reveal the situated methods and practices that children use - not because they are children, but because they are social beings. As well as appealing to scholars of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, 'Talk and Social Interaction in the Playground' will be of interest to students and researchers in a range of disciplines, including child studies, developmental psychology, education, applied linguistics, and sociology.

This book focuses on adoptive families after the legal finalization of the adoption has taken place. The authors, Susan Livingston Smith and Jeanne A. Howard, incorporate the findings of their own unique research project on troubled adoptive families with other empirical research, theory, practice, and knowledge. This volume is rich with case examples, detailed case histories, presentations of various practice strategies, and resources. The overall result is a stand-alone volume offering a clear and well-documented overview of the topic. It will be invaluable to social workers and other professionals working with children and families.

Visual media offer powerful communication opportunities. Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People explores the methodological, ethical, representational and theoretical issues surrounding image-based research with children and young people. It provides well-argued and illustrated resources to guide novice and experienced researchers through the challenges and benefits of visual research. Because new digital technologies have made it easier and cheaper to work with visual media, Pat Thomson brings together an international body of leading researchers who use a range of media to produce research data and communicate findings. Situating their discussions of visual research approaches within the context of actual research projects in communities and schools, and discussing a range of media from drawings, painting, collage and montages to film, video, photographs and new media, the book offers practical pointers for conducting research. These include why visual research is used how to involve children and young people as co-researchers complexities in analysis of images and the ethics of working visually institutional difficulties that can arise when working with a 'visual voice' how to manage resources in research projects Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People will be an ideal guide for researchers both at undergraduate and postgraduate level across disciplines, including education, youth and social work, health and nursing, criminology and community studies. It will also act as an up-to-date resource on this rapidly changing approach for practitioners working in the field. Pat Thomson is Professor of Education and Director of Research in the School of Education, University of Nottingham, UK. She is a former school principal of disadvantaged schools in Australia.

Visual media offer powerful communication opportunities. Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People explores the methodological, ethical, representational and theoretical issues surrounding image-based research with children and young people. It provides well-argued and illustrated resources to guide novice and experienced researchers through the challenges and benefits of visual research. Because new digital technologies have made it easier and cheaper to work with visual media, Pat Thomson brings together an international body of leading researchers who use a range of media to produce research data and communicate findings. Situating their discussions of visual research approaches within the context of actual research projects in communities and schools, and discussing a range of media from drawings, painting, collage and montages to film, video, photographs and new media, the book offers practical pointers for conducting research. These include why visual research is used how to involve children and young people as co-researchers complexities in analysis of images and the ethics of working visually institutional difficulties that can arise when working with a 'visual voice' how to manage resources in research projects Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People will be an ideal guide for researchers both at undergraduate and postgraduate level across disciplines, including education, youth and social work, health and nursing, criminology and community studies. It will also act as an up-to-date resource on this rapidly changing approach for practitioners working in the field. Pat Thomson is Professor of Education and Director of Research in the School of Education, University of Nottingham, UK. She is a former school principal of disadvantaged schools in Australia.

Although psychologists by training, John and Elizabeth Newson have more aptly been described as pioneers in social ecology; they work from the conviction that the causes and the consequences of child-rearing attitudes can fruitfully be investigated only in the framework of the total social environment in which they occur. This book continues their analysis of child rearing in an English urban setting.

To this project the Newsons have brought the rigorous research techniques of their scientific background; but they do not undervalue the practical experience of parenthood which has taught them to distrust the magical short cuts to "understanding" child development offered by the various theoretical schools of thought. They believe that much of the theory-building has been premature and that there is an urgent need for detailed descriptive studies of how parents do in fact treat their, children and, equally important, how children treat their parents: the constant two-way interaction through which the pattern of family life is evolved.

The four-year-old child has been much discussed from the angle of nursery school education: this book breaks new ground in its description of nursery-age children in the much more basic and intimate context of the home. Written without recourse to unnecessary technical jargon, it will be of absorbing interest to every intelligent parent and indeed to anyone looking for new insights into the working of our society. For teachers, doctors, nurses, and all whose profession it is to work with young children or with their families, it will be both essential and enjoyable reading.

"John Newson" and "Elizabeth Newson" in addition to this book are authors of "The Family and the Handicapped Child: A Study of Cerebral Palsied Children in Their Homes" and "Infant Care in an Urban Community." They were professors of psychology at the University of Nottingham.

The child star is an iconic figure in Western society representing a growing cultural trend which idolises, castigates and fetishises the image of the perfect, innocent and beautiful child. In this book, Jane O'Connor explores the paradoxical status of the child star who is both adored and reviled in contemporary society. Drawing on current debates about the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood and fears about children 'growing up too soon', she identifies hostile media attention around child stars as indicative of broader social concerns about the 'correct' role and place of children in relation to normative ideals of childhood. Through reference to extensive empirical examples of the way child stars such as Shirley Temple, Macaulay Culkin, Charlotte Church and Jackie Coogan have been constructed in the media, this book illustrates both the powerlessness and the power held by this tiny band of children, and demonstrates their significance as representatives of the public face of childhood throughout the twentieth century and beyond.